Reschedule & cancel
Plans change. WhenTap lets both you and your customers move or cancel a booking, and when a booking moves or is cancelled, WhenTap updates its calendar event, reminders, payment and CMS item.
Customers do it themselves
Every confirmation email includes a private link to that specific booking. The customer opens it, no login and no account, and can:
- Pick a new time from the same live availability the widget uses.
- Cancel the booking.
The link is a signed token unique to that booking, so it only ever exposes that one booking and cannot be guessed.
The cancellation cutoff
Each service has a cutoff: how close to the start a customer may still reschedule or cancel online. It is 24 hours by default, and you can change it per service (set it to 0 to allow changes until the appointment starts). Inside the cutoff, the manage page tells the customer it is too close to change online and to contact you directly. A new time picked when rescheduling must also be outside the cutoff.
Customers can only change a booking that is still confirmed and upcoming. A cancelled, completed or past booking shows a note instead of the buttons.
If two people grab the same new slot at once, one gets it and the other is told "That time was just taken. Please pick another." No double booking.
When a customer reschedules or cancels, you (and the staff member, if they have an email) get an email about it.
You do it from the panel
Open Bookings, use the menu on a booking, and:
- Reschedule to any open slot. WhenTap rechecks availability (ignoring this booking's own time), moves the calendar event, re-schedules the reminders around the new time, emails the customer the new time, and updates the CMS item's date. The cutoff does not apply to you.
- Cancel it. WhenTap asks you to confirm, then stops its reminders, removes the calendar event, updates the CMS item's status, emails the customer, and, if it was paid, refunds it.
- Mark it completed or a no-show once it has happened, which flows through to the CMS item's status too.
- Confirm without payment for a booking still waiting on payment, if the customer paid you another way.
Refunds
When a paid booking is cancelled, from either side, WhenTap refunds it in full on your connected Stripe account without you doing anything, and the customer's email says so.
If Stripe refuses the refund (for example because Stripe was disconnected from the site, or the account balance cannot cover it), the booking is still cancelled, the payment is not shown as refunded, the booking is marked "refund failed" in the panel, and you get an email asking you to refund from your Stripe dashboard. The customer is told the refund could not be processed automatically. See Taking payments with Stripe.
What a change updates
A reschedule or cancel updates four things:
- the calendar event (moved or removed),
- the reminders (re-timed or stopped),
- the CMS item (date or status updated),
- the payment (refunded on cancel).